“Bottoms” Asks the Question: “What Do You Wear to a Queer Fight Club?”

In case you missed it, Bottoms is the hotly-anticipated lesbian fight club film by Emma Seligman starring Rachel Sennott (who also featured in Seligman’s directorial debut Shiva Baby) and Ayo Edebiri (the breakout star of The Bear) that premiered at SXSW.  

Sennott and Edibiri play best friends PJ and Josie, highschoolers in a nondescript town in a not-so-distant past. Together, the two decide to form a “self-defense” fight club while trying to score with their respective girl crushes, popular cheerleaders Brittany and Isabel, played by Kaia Gerber and Havana Rose Liu, respectively.  

What ensues is camp and wry with a tinge of noir—a moveable feast of girl-on-girl action (of the fighting variety; the film doesn’t shy away from brawls and blood), perpetual tension, and a deliberate, in-your-face irony that prods at the insecurities and traumas teenagers confront everyday (e.g., gender stereotypes, eating disorders, sexual abuse). 

These crises of identity are further propelled by the characters’ sartorial choices. Layered plaids and stripes under overalls, vintage velour tracksuits, graphic T-shirts and babydoll sheaths are the result of a collaboration between Seligman and the film’s costume designer Eunice Jera Lee. 

“Once I joined the project, Emma told me what she wanted the overall tone to be,” says Lee. “We wanted the fashion to be timeless, to bring in inspirations from Y2K films and films from past eras, from Grease (1978) to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Heathers (1988), Jawbreaker (1999), and Bring It On (2000)—all movies that were part of our formative youth.” 

Lee, a Korean-American who grew up in Orange County, California, is also a Central Saint Martins M.A. Fashion alum and a former fashion stylist (her work has been featured in W Korea, Dossier, and Schön, among other publications). After living for years in London and Seoul, she returned to L.A. in 2016 to costume design for Gook, Blue Bayou, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and the forthcoming Warhol-Basquiat film The Collaboration.